Suddenly on defense against what Model came to call another ‘cannon fodder infantry attack,’ the General gave orders that his troops should adopt a hedgehog strongpoint strategy instead of trying to maintain a continuous front.
“All units will stand and fight where they are,” he said. “I will not pay for the same ground twice! Where is Munzel?”
“He is forming up on the road,” said a Major.
“Well, tell him to get moving!”
That was going to be easier said than done that morning, for Munzel’s panzers had fought hard the previous day, and his units had been taking on supply before continuing up the road. Rhun’s detachment was in the best shape, with 50% supplies on hand. While Rodenhauser and von Heyden were both down to 10%. He moved Rhun into tactical reserve behind the village of Molochnyy on the main road, which was all he could do for the moment.
For his part, Eberbach’s visit with Kuzma Podlas at Ulyanovka was suddenly interrupted by the onrushing arrival of two regiments of the tough 32nd Siberian Guards. Podlas was relieved to finally get help, which gave him just the time he needed to get his last two battalions of artillery to the rear, where they quickly set up and began to pour out supporting fire.
Unlike Model, Eberbach ordered an immediate counterattack towards the village, calling in a battalion of KG Dorn’s Panzergrenadiers to support his tanks, and radioing back for his second panzer battalion to hasten to the scene. It was then that he got some bad news.
“Hold on, enemy tanks hit Dorn’s pioneer company well south of your position. That is very near the Corps artillery park!”
As if on cue, Mikhail Katukov had chosen that moment to make a bold thrust at the main road to Tula. After withdrawing from his brief engagement at Chern, he had not moved north to join the Siberians, which is why there had been no reports of enemy tanks in these attacks. Instead he move due east, regrouping at a small village called Lugovka, and now, hearing the Siberians were attacking, he took his tanks north looking for trouble.
What he found was 3rd Company, 79th Pioneers, attached to KG Dorn, and screening not only the Korps artillery park, but most all of the guns for 4th Panzer Division as well! Eberbach cursed when he heard the news, for now he would not be able to fight with his full kampfgruppe. He had no choice but to order his second battalion to move south to confront the new threat. KG Seiden was also holding that flank, though further north, and he was ordered to send one of his two battalions in support. The troops were already engaged with remnants of the men Kuzma Podlas had scraped together the previous night, and now it had to fight its way out to get back south.
The Division Commander, General der Panzertruppen Langermann, was fortunately in a good position to see what was happening from his post on Hill 925 astride the main road. He quickly ordered the division flak units to move to that flank and lend any support they could give.
By mid-day the situation was clear. This was no spoiling attack or blocking force. The Germans had been hit by six fresh rifle divisions, and Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade. Model chafed at the bit to resolve the situation so he could continue his advance, but this time the task was beyond even his considerable skills. He soon found his entire division arrayed as small islands of steel in a Red Sea of confusion. It was a sobering call to Guderian that day when the General finally got off the plane at Orel.
“We have hit a brick wall south of Tula,” he said. “These are fresh troops, a new army, and they fight like wildcats. My men have been in active defense all morning, and still they come. We are holding out, but many of our positions have been swamped by these incessant attacks.”
“Tanks?” asked Guderian.
“Not many,” said Model, “but they do not even need them. I must be facing at least five strong rifle divisions, and they have good artillery support. Under the circumstances, any further advance is impossible, and I will need help—the sooner the better.”
“Very well,” said Guderian. “Hold on. I will see what I can do as soon as possible.”
To this end, he called up his 29th Motorized Division, which had finally been relieved by infantry near Bryansk, and was moving to Orel. It would be a most welcome reinforcement, but would still be some time getting to the scene of the action. In the meantime Generalleutnant von Loeper’s 10th Motorized Division had reached Ivanovka by dusk, and was fanning out in a wide defensive arc. Without that timely move, the situation on the main road would have been far more grievous, because soon after they arrived, the division was hit by a massed cavalry charge on its right flank.
The Russians had put in their 4th Cavalry Corps there, five brigades of mounted riflemen, some of them the vaunted Cossacks and Tartars that had recently chased down Ivan Volkov’s 22nd Air Mobile battalions in that daring but disastrous second raid on Ilanskiy. These troops were supported by the only other armor available, two light tanks units with mainly T-60s. If von Loeper’s men had not been there to take the brunt of that attack, these swift horsemen would have swept right down to Chernyavka where Model’s headquarters had been established. It was now clear what the Soviets were attempting to do, and Guderian’s entire XXIV Panzer Corps was now facing attacks on every side.
Like Langermann, Model was forced to throw everything he had into the defense, including his division flak units. He looked over his shoulder, when a column came up, but was disappointed to see it was only rail repair battalions.
“Soon I will have to find rifles for those men,” he said, and he ordered them to dig in north of Chernyavka to form a makeshift defense for his headquarters.
29th Motorized got the word to move north, and the men leapt to their trucks, but not even this new division would be enough to stop the attack. Its arrival would stabilize the situation, bringing relief to the weary Panzergrenadiers, some units down to 10 % supply. The situation looked more favorable—until the Soviets suddenly attacked with fresh armor.
Sergei Kirov was determined to stop the Germans at Tula, and now he ordered one of his refitting tank corps into action, even though it was still reorganizing one of its two scheduled tank brigades. Reforming far to the east and receiving all new tanks, the 3rd Tank Corps was really a heavy division sized formation comprised of a single tank brigade, and motorized rifle troops. The 5th Brigade had 54 new T-34s, 12 KV-1 and another 12 of the massive KV-2 heavy assault tanks. Following their improvised Corps structure, the Motor Rifle troops had been built up to a full strength division, the 84th, with three full motor rifle regiments, along with the corps motorcycle cavalry regiment. Its second tank brigade had not yet formed, and the engineer battalion was still on the trains, but Kirov ordered an immediate attack. As at Mtsensk, the shock of encountering a full brigade of new tanks in a single massed formation was considerable. With all his remaining divisions still trying to clear pockets of Soviet resistance astride the road from Orel to Tula, Guderian called Hoth.
“I’m told you have all the new tanks, Hoth. Don’t be stingy! I need them south of Tula. Can you send me anything?”
After learning what had happened, and seeing that his own troops were encountering much less opposition well to the west, Hoth was more than willing to lend support. “Seventh Panzer has been refitting since early August, and it received some of the newer tanks. I have much less opposition on my front, so you can have the entire division. For that matter, you can have Schwerepanzerbrigaden 101, as well. They are much closer to your operation than my main line of advance. I will cut the orders immediately.”
And so it was that one thing led to another, like two opposing sides throwing logs on a fire, which would soon grow bigger and bigger until it burned as one of the fiercest battles yet fought in the campaign to date. Known as ‘The Action South of Tula,’ it would be the first real test on the new German Panzer designs, and a rich hunting ground for one other man with a fated future, a simple Sergeant who had joined the Wehrmacht in Czechoslovakia, because he had been too bored with his old job in an auto factory there.
His name was Ku
rt Knispel.
*
Schwerepanzerbrigaden 101 was very close, and the Germans had a man there that would also make a name for himself as a deadly armored charioteer. Knispel served with 12th Panzer Division for a time, as a loader in a Mark IV tank, until his commanding officer recommended him for training on the new tanks starting to arrive at the receiving stations. Some said he wanted to simply get the man out of his regiment, for Knispel was a freewheeling Sergeant with a chip on his shoulder when it came to senior officers, which he saw as busybodies always sticking their noses into things they knew nothing about.
He had come up through the ranks in the armored units, and had shown enough promise to be recommended for training on the new Löwe-55, and soon found himself settling into Germany’s premier new armored fighting unit.
A short, rough hewn young man of just twenty years, Knispel had a thick head of hair, and heavy brows that joined above his nose, prompting the men to call him ‘the werewolf.’ Soon they would see it as the Lion’s mane, and his unkempt beard, long sideburns, and the non-regulation tattoo on his neck, gave him a wild look, though he could clean up and sport the uniform as well as anyone else if he chose to. More often than not, he would eschew the formality of regulations and dress haphazardly, sometimes not even wearing a shirt, his coat open, the grease of his own tank on his hands and forearms.
Yet he was very popular with his fellow soldiers, amiable and quick to smile, who saw him as a kind of maverick, though some never understood how he could get away with all the things he did. Once he had even put his hands on an officer, when he came across the man badly mistreating a few Soviet POWs. The Leutnant had thought to amuse himself by urinating on the captured Russians, which infuriated Knispel. He took hold of the man’s jersey, practically lifting him off the ground, and told him that if he ever saw him do such a thing again, he would personally do the very same thing to him!
With twelve kills under his belt, and an uncanny knack for sighting and positioning his tank in action, Knispel was elated when they gave him one of the new Löwe-55s.
“Look at that monster!” he said, beaming ear to ear. “Fifty-five tons, 100mm armor, and a brand new high velocity 75mm gun!”
“It will be slow, Kurt,” said Lt. Hellman, who also came to the unit from the old 12th Panzer. “You won’t be able to run about like you could with that Mark IV. I’m told it will barely give us 40 to 45KPH, and we may be road bound when the rains come.”
“We shall see,” said Knispel, and he would soon begin putting the new tank through its paces, becoming quite good at his trade. In fact, he would end the war with more confirmed kills to his credit than any man in history, all of 168, with scores more that were unconfirmed, or kills he simply shunted off to the credit of a fellow soldier. He never kept count, and cared little for the iron crosses and gold badges that he would soon earn. The only thing that mattered to him was winning, and the other men he fought with. Tenacious in combat, just as Lavrinenko was on the other side, Kurt Knispel would never leave a comrade still fighting on the field of battle.
He was the best of the best, exceeding the record of other highly accomplished and more polished combat veterans like Otto Carious and Michael Whittmann, but he had three years to log his kills. But out there, beyond the low rolling hills to the north was a man who would get his 52 tanks in a matter of a few months, before an errant fragment of a mortar round ended his meteoric rise—Dmitri Lavrinenko. As the 101st Heavy Panzer Brigade was now hastily moving up to rescue Model, the two men would soon meet, each the perfect nemesis and foil for the other.
Chapter 33
Disaster had a way of striking when you least needed or expected it. The front line had become a tortuous affair, bent like a badly twisted girder of steel as the Germans had rammed home their offensive operations. Several large salients had formed where the Soviets stubbornly held their ground. In the north, one such salient was centered on and around the vital city of Smolensk. Sergei Kirov knew that the defense there had all but derailed the German advance on Moscow from that direction, and so he hoped the same thing would happen now, pouring the divisions of his 20th and 29th Armies into the defense. The Germans eventually pushed into the city with the hardened infantry of the 4th Army, and now they were mounting a determined pincer operation aimed at trapping all the Russian troops that had assembled to defend that place, about 18 divisions in all.
The 41st Panzer Korps of Hoepner’s 4th Panzergruppe was on one side, and a Korps that had been detached from Hoth earlier, including Knispel’s old outfit, 12th Panzer Division, joined the other pincer. The Germans took aim at the town of Safonovo, about 90 kilometers up the road from Smolensk to Vyazma, and Moscow beyond. After nearly a week of hard fighting, the mobile units managed to punch through and envelop the armies still defending near Smolensk. Fearing they would eventually lose all those divisions, STAVKA gave the order to attempt a breakout, which was always a dangerous operation.
Men who had been stolidly defending from well improved positions now had to effect a tactical withdrawal under heavy enemy pressure, but by the time the movement started, it was already too late. The German vise of steel had already closed around the Smolensk Army Group, and as the main rifle divisions pulled off the line, the German infantry fell on the rear guard detachments with a vengeance
To make matters worse, once through at Safonovo, the right pincer still had sufficient strength to drive up the road towards Vyazma. It was there that the ‘Kirov Defense Line’ ended in the north, right astride the road to Moscow. Beyond that point there was nothing of any consequence, a vast gap of 150 kilometers to Rzhev where the 22nd Army was still forming in reserve. Desperate to stop the Germans at Vyazma, and fill that gap. STAVKA ordered the 22nd south at once, a come as you are party for units that were still fitting out and training new raw recruits.
The road net from Rzhev to Vyazma did not favor that move, and it would be three days before those troops might reach the point of greatest threat. In the meantime, STAVKA looked into its reserves and scraped up five rifle divisions, putting them on the trains from their marshalling stations in the east and rushing them through the late summer night to pull into Vyazma just as the Germans were closing in on the outskirts of that town. The 234th Rifle Division of the Moscow Militia had also come down the road from the capital, and now it screened the arrival of these fresh troops, who literally leapt from the rail cars with little more than a rifle slung over their shoulder, and rushed through the town towards the growing sounds of battle.
So it was that just as he was finding some encouragement in the stunning blow that had been delivered by the 1st Siberian Shock Army, Sergei Kirov now received the news of the wild situation developing to the west of the city, on the road to Smolensk. The Germans were coming at them from more than one direction.
“The Smolensk Group was too late in moving,” said Berzin dejectedly. “Now they will have to try and fight their way out of that cauldron. And if we do not now abandon that salient at Roslaval, they will soon find themselves in the same situation. That is another 15 divisions in the remnants of 13th and 11th Armies. If they are cut off, then there will be nothing to defend the city of Kirov itself. There are little more than irregular militias and artillery now manning the fortifications there. Everything else is in that salient.”
“Can we save them without a disaster like the Smolensk Group?”
“If we move quickly,” said Berzin. “I consulted Zhukov, and he thinks good rear guards can hold just long enough to save the main rifle divisions. In this instance, the road is still open, and no German mechanized units are operating in that sector.”
“Is there any threat the Germans might cut that road?”
“Not at the moment,” said Berzin. “And you can again thank Karpov for that. The reserve army he sent from Perm is holding like a stone wall west of Spas-Demensk.”
“The fighting 24th Siberian,” said Kirov. “Yes, Karpov wasn’t bragging when he said he had good, ba
ttle hardened men.”
“Agreed,” said Berzin. “You may have paid a high price in turning over that ship, but it has already returned good dividends. In this situation, with the 24th Army shielding the withdrawal, Zhukov thinks this operation can be conducted fairly smoothly.”
“Then we must get them out now,” said Kirov. “Now, while the main road is still open. Yes, we’ll lose the factory at Roslaval, but we pulled out most of the machinery last week, and it is already relocating. Order 13th Army to fall back on the Kirov line, and man the defenses of that city. And what about the 34th Army?”
“It is at Volokamsk,” said Berzin, “still assembling and fitting out its rifle divisions.” That was a reserve marshalling area about 100 kilometers north west of Moscow.
“Well they must be ready to move as soon as possible,” said Kirov. “With the troops we pull out of Roslaval, the 22nd coming down from Rzhev, and the 34th from Volokamsk, that will give us enough to hold the line. Yes?”
“I certainly hope so,” said Berzin, “but the 22nd and 34th were being held for our winter counterattack. You’ve already committed the 1st Siberian Shock Army. Zhukov will want to know what he is to plan that offensive with now.”
“It can’t be helped,” said Kirov. “We need to hold them as far west of Moscow as possible.”
“Zhukov thinks we should let them come east and then hit them on their northern flank.”
“A good plan,” said Kirov, but the Raputista is only now beginning. The roads are still fairly passable, which means the Germans still have reasonable mobility. If those Panzer formations encircling the Smolensk Group get infantry support, and then turn east before we establish this new defense line…”
“I understand, sir,” said Berzin, a sober, harried look on his face. “And what about Bryansk? There is only one road open to that city now, the road to Kirov.”
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